Tuesday, 14 January 2014

nanoblock Empire State Building Review

The Empire State Building is a 103-story skyscraper located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet (381 meters), and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft (443.2 m) high. It stood as the world's tallest building for nearly 40 years, from its completion in early 1931. More info on Wikipedia.

This nanoblock version is nano-scale model of the real thing. It comes in a medium sized box with 740+ pieces of bricks and a large sheet of instruction.

Contents of this set

All the bricks in this set are either clear blue or light grey. This is not surprising given that this building is mostly just grey with glass windows. For custom builders, if you need a lot of small light grey bricks for your own project, this set is perfect.

Types of bricks in this set

The difficulty rating for this set is 3, but I will probably rate it as a 2. It is more tedious than difficult, with a lot of repetition. Other than the need to keep count of the number of times you have repeated certain steps, there is nothing tricky about this build. Here are some photos taken during the build process.

Extra bricks included with set

It took 80 minutes to complete this building and it stands at 21cm tall. The design is quite nice for a tall grey building. You can view the finished photos below.

Considering that they designed this building with lots of blue clear brick windows, one would think they would make it LED base "compatible", but no, they used a green base plate.

Well, that is not going to stop us from lighting it up, is it? I pretty much just plucked the building off the green based plate and moved it on top of the LED base plate. Only the first bottom layer is stuck on the green base plate and needs to be manually transferred brick by brick. After that, you need to make some slight modifications on layers where bricks are blocking the light from travelling up. Only a few layers need to be modified and they are quite simple to do. The end result is very nice.